Cooker plates of this type, for example as described in German Pat. No. 1,189,217, have a relatively small thermal capacity and are therefore quite suitable for rapid initial cooking procedures when small amounts of product are to be cooked.
They do however have the substantial drawback that they do not form a closed cooking surface so that if material which is being cooked overflows, it can run past them into the interior of the cooker whence it can be removed later on only with difficulty. The entire cooker surface is therefore made to be pivotal so that the interior of the cooker can be cleaned. The cooker unit has a dish which collects the material which has overflowed. This dish lies at a substantial distance below the spirally wound tubular heating bodies. Moreover, these known tubular cooker plates have the disadvantage that their temperature can be controlled only poorly.
A cooker unit is also known from U.S. Pat. No. 1,979,471, in which the cooking surface is formed by a ceramic plate with deep spiral grooves which are open at the top and in which lie heating coils. A radiant heating means is thus formed since the ceramic plate transfers the heat only poorly. In this case, cooking material which has overflowed is particularly unpleasant because it runs directly on to the open heating elements and sticks to them or short-circuits them under certain circumstances. Moreover, heating elements of this type in the form of open resistance wires are objectionable for safety reasons.